hh_mirror | traveling with style (closed RP: Nebulon and the liopleurodon researchers)

Current Location: Hershey, PA

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traveling with style (closed RP: Nebulon and the liopleurodon researchers)

Nebulon had been tipped off. His nemesis had finally deciphered his cryptic hints about The Milk Chocolate, and had gone to Hershey, taking with her two innocent bystanders. Now Nebulon had to stop her from uncovering the many sweet secrets to be found at the chocolate factory, lest she take her Candyland victory way past board game territory and into the real world.

Nebulon never learned to Apparate. He didn't need to learn that. He could travel through space, wibbling and blibbling unconcerned through zero gravity and zero atmosphere. It was just what he did. There were only two things about space he didn't like. First, in space, no one could hear you sing. Second, unless you got near an asteroid or something, there was nothing to tag. No one in space could see the proud blazon of NEB-1. He might go into graffiti withdrawal!

His carefree blibbling abilities kept his re-entry into Earth's atmosphere gentle and light. (A hot meteoric streak across the sky might have had style. Nebulon, much to his dismay, only had the kind of style that no one likes.) He touched down in Hershey long before Dax and her henchmen, and proceeded to scrape together a disguise. A trench coat. A big hat. He couldn't really do anything about his height, so he got a motorised wheelchair in which to blibble along. He tried to disguise his eyestalks as a bobble-antenna headband, by putting on a plain green headband to match it, though the big hat then covered the headband. The finishing touch was a huge false black mustache. It did not have curlicues at the end, as Nebulon did not wish to appear evil!

Thus equipped, many cans of spray paint strapped to his green body under the coat, he began a concerted campaign of Purposeful Lurking. Soon Dax would show up. Nebulon would be ready. He would fend her off, and he would do it with style.

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Chance is not a happy camper. She's keeping it together, because this is her research and she can't afford to slack off, but she's tired and she's really cranky and she didn't get very much sleep on the airplane. Then the drive from the airport to Hershey had taken a lot out of her. The car rental people ignored her request for an economy car -- cheap, small, easy to handle -- and 'upgraded' her to a huge freaking SUV (http://autoobserver.typepad.com/photos/uncategorized/chevroletsuburban1_2.jpg).

And now she can't seem to find Chocolate World. There are clearly marked blue signs everywhere pointing to Chocolate World, and none of them are taking her in the right direction. She'll drive where one of them points, keep going a while, and then come up on a sign that says it must be the opposite direction she's going, which should mean she passed it. She hasn't passed it. She just keeps passing ZooAmerica. Whatever the hell that is.

"I hate this car," she mutters, wrangling with it to turn the behemoth around for the umpteenth time.

Trying to find Chocolate World seems as doomed a prospect as trying to find Candy Mountain itself. These elusive places -- maybe a live liopleurodon could survive there, just by virtue of the fact no one could get there to kill it.

And there's the ZooAmerica sign again. "You don't suppose someone replaced the Chocolate World entrance sign with a ZooAmerica one just to put us off the track?" God, she's gotten so paranoid. This work is really getting to her.

"I don't see how any of the Kandies could have heard about this trip," Henry said. "Unless they have some damn good spies at Hogwarts, too." He was as appalled by the car as Chance--his own car, when he'd been alive, had been small and economical, unlike this thyroidal monster. He supposed it would have been useful if they'd had more luggage, but as it was all it was good for was gobbling gasoline. "I think it's safer to say that whoever laid out the signs was either mentally deficient or taking some very interesting drugs," he added, dry as a desert.

As Nebulon readied himself for battle, his stalwart opponent busied herself with a vital avenue of questioning.

"Chance, when can I drive? I've piloted spaceships before," she reasoned. "Hundreds of them. Why, there was this one time, in the middle of the Klingon War, that I- OH!" She craned her neck, and pointed out the window. "The streetlights (http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/3/39/Hershey%2C_Pennsylvania.JPG) are shaped like candy!"

How nifty!

In between bothering Chance about driving, and pointing out Sights to See to both her companions (cows, billboards, more cows, more billboards, etc), Dax had entertained herself by upgrading the SUV's on board navigation system. "I've implemented technology from my era into this system, and it still can't find Chocolate World. It can, however, make a cup of coffee."

So she'd made a replicator, too. That was most likely covered by the rental insurance!

So that's what Dax has been doing with the dashboard. Chance has been keeping her eyes on the road, and frankly she hasn't wanted to know exactly what Dax is up to, just in case it isn't covered by the rental insurance. (She stills those pangs of anxiety by reminding herself they're traveling with a bank, aka Henry Winter.)

"Damn. The streetlights are shaped like candy. That's kind of taking it a little too far, in my opinion. Chocolate Avenue, Cocoa Avenue ..." The car passes at low speed a dentist's office: Cocoa Dental Group. "Job security," Chance mutters, eyeing the sign as they drive by.

On her fourth pass down the backroad between fences, a wooden rollercoaster looming to one side, Chance decides she's had enough of this shit. She turns the SUV sharply into the ZooAmerica lot. "Right. We're getting out and asking where the fuck they're hiding Chocolate World."

More nicely than that, okay. But asking.

"... And asking what animals they have in the zoo," she adds as an afterthought. Because, well, it's a long shot, but wouldn't it be in keeping with the crazy logic of this whole endeavor if the liopleurodon is sitting right there in a zoo?

Henry was just about as technically inept as it was possible to be in modern times, but even he found Dax's modifications...interesting. "How does it work?" he asked, knowing full well that he wasn't likely to understand the techno-babble that would surely ensue. "What does it use to create the coffee?" He wondered vaguely if it could call coffee up out of the air, like a trick of the old gods. Somehow, the idea verged on profanity.

"Maybe someone did anticipate our coming," he said, and frowned. "Though I don't like the thought. There would have to have been a spy in the library with us." It was an unsettling speculation--how could someone have gotten to America ahead of them, even if they had known of the trip?

Of course, maybe they were just lost. But you never knew. This trip was making him paranoid.

Dax hesitated. Normally, she would have been more than happy to explain the process of replication. In minute detail. Several times, if need be. Perhaps with visual aides!

But that would have taken up precious time that the intrepid scholars simply did not have. "I'll send you a few books on the subject when we're back at Hogwarts," she promised. Normally, Dax tried her best to limit the contact 21st century humans had with information from her era. But being that Henry was a student at a pan-dimensional magical school, Dax reasoned that a little timeline pollution on his part was to be expected.

"It's entirely possible we were being spied on in the library," Dax said, clicking open her seatbelt and hopping out of the car. Honestly, she'd assumed something like this was going to happen. Nebulon was very, very good at what he did.

...whatever it was the he did, exactly.

"At this point, we should assume that someone's always listening in. Oh! Look! It's lizard week." Exciting stuff!

((Reposted for typos.))

Meanwhile, inside ZooAmerica (http://themeparkbrochures.net/maps/2006/zooam2006.html) ...

Nebulon had been a very, very busy exo-patriate. Misdirecting the Chocolate World traffic to ZooAmerica required much alteration of signage. With every sign he touched, he underwent anew a tearing maddening urge to mark his territory, and he could not afford to indulge this urge. A telltale NEB-1 in blocky letters across a ZooAmerica sign -- or any sign in Hershey, for that matter -- would give away the whole game.

In the Animal Health center, behind the safety of the Staff Only cordons, he slumped in a plastic chair and ignored the chittering of a curious rodent. He didn't know what kind of rodent it was. He couldn't be bothered to read the little placard on the cage; he would only be tempted to tag the plaque with a Sharpie. The rodent sneezed at him, which explained why it was in the Animal Health center, and Nebulon blibbled a discontented blorp.

The Milk Chocolate was running him ragged.

He knew his enemy passably well. Dax would undoubtedly be diverted by the many Terran zoological specimens. She might even be diverted until Chocolate World closed for the evening. If not, well, Nebulon would still have bought time. Time for mootrition to have its day.

And there was that little surprise he'd prepared in the near-dark hall of nocturnal animals. That one had been an improvised and sudden stroke of green-assed genius if he did say so himself.

'Rock over London. Rock on, Chicago.
Folgers: it's good to the last drop. (http://www.lyricstime.com/wesley-willis-vampire-bat-lyrics.html)'

In the dim cool of the Animal Health center, Nebulon smiled...

***

We rejoin our heroes:

"Lizard week? Hm."

It's a common misconception that a plesiosaur's the same as a dinosaur. It's not. Anything that swims or flies can't be called a dinosaur, ergo a liopleurodon's not a dinosaur. If museum curators can't always be bothered to keep their facts straight -- Chance still sees red when she remembers how they changed the title of her exhibit of freshwater amphibians to 'At the Ocean's Edge' -- then your average amusement park zookeeper probably isn't above reproach either. So, even though a liopleurodon is not a 'lizard,' Chance gets a little intrigued.

"Doesn't say anything about a magical bridge of hope and wonder, does it? ... Didn't think so." Well, they'll go in anyway.

She pays their admission, a bargain for a zoo, under 10 bucks a person, so cheap she doesn't even bother angling for an educational discount. The Ministry, or the Hat, or whoever mysteriously paved the way for her quick grant approval, has seen fit to furnish the trio with a full array of official papers, including 'faculty identification' corresponding to a UK institution of learning that actually does not exist but that sounds obscure enough your average American wouldn't know it doesn't.

They each get a map. Chance unfolds hers and has a look.

"This is a really small zoo," Chance says, very quietly so as not to offend the smiling lady at the entrance desk they've just left behind.

She doesn't think there's room for a liopleurodon, the way this place must be laid out.

Henry, by this point, was more interested in finding somewhere he could smoke than in any liopleurodon. Certain that even if the rental company had allowed smoking in the cars, Chance and Dax wouldn't, he'd gone without a cigarette for an unheard-of three hours. A lesser person ~~like his mun~~ would have demanded a break, but Henry, being Henry, simply got quiet and increasingly stoic.

"Lizard week?" he questioned. He wondered if this Nebulon was not, in fact, some kind of lizard--a nefarious lizard-alien, somehow connected with the Kandies. If the strange green creature was indeed the one who had swapped the signs, and thus gotten them all so ingloriously lost, Henry wanted nothing more than to snap its fragile little neck.

He unfolded his own map, by way of distraction, and scanned it idly. Nicotine deprivation was hardly conducive to any kind of clear thinking, but he could at least go through the motions until he found somewhere to duck out of the way and at least have half a cigarette. Just half. Two puffs, even.

"Lizard week," Dax reaffirmed, for the benefit of all parties. "Although..." she looked at the map with a frown. "Several of these species will be reclassified as mammals in less than two decades."

Ah, well.

"Does anyone have a location they'd like to examine first? I've always been fascinated by nocturnal species, myself."

Fate was a funny thing.

Little could Henry know that, far from having a fragile little neck to wring, Nebulon had absolutely no neck at all! And no chin! His head and his torso were pretty much the same thing! He was downright unwringable.

He was, in any event, no longer on the zoo premises. He had blibbled stealthily away from ZooAmerica entirely. He would hold a lone vigil at Chocolate World.

His minions would do his work at the zoo. If the sage words of Wesley Willis could be believed, the researchers on the Kandy trail would soon be in no condition to visit Chocolate World, or indeed anyplace that required walking.

***

"There's a 'suggested route' on the map," Chance answers Dax, still looking at her own copy of said map. "Actually it looks like pretty much the only way to go. We can speed through the stuff that doesn't interest us, if you want to get to the nocturnal animal hall sooner." That area's probably air-conditioned, which appeals to Chance.

"If you wouldn't mind, could you point out which lizard species are going to be reclassified as mammals when we pass them? I'd like to judge that firsthand. Don't worry, I won't publish anything. I don't want to mess up the future."

As if she could publish anything even if she wanted, Chance thinks sadly. No peer-reviewed journal would take her work if she couldn't substantiate her credentials. Her name might not be any good here: this world's Chance Silvey might never have graduated her PhD program -- might never have gone to grad school, even. Might not have survived that childhood car accident, for all Chance knows.

Being somewhere dark and cool suddenly sounds like a very good idea, nocturnal animals purely coincidental to the idea's appeal. In the dark her companions won't be able to see her face. In the dark she won't have to put up a front.

"This way," she says, and strides off along the designated route, expecting the others to follow.

"Oh, certainly. A few of them may surprise you." Under normal circumstances, Dax would have been very concerned with the preservation of the time line. But Chance was as good as her word, and any case, she'd dated a space doctor. Her opportunity to lead a temporally clean lifestyle had long since faded.

As they walked through the exhibit, Dax pointed out two species of Heloderma that would soon spontaneously evolve, thanks to a rather humorous encounter with a plasma experiment gone awry. "For months afterward, the entire state of New Mexico smelled like cabbage," Dax elaborated, as the doors opened to the dark hallway of the nocturnal animals exhibit.

For a moment, it looked as if the walls themselves were shaking. Then suddenly, a swarm of vampire bats, somehow set free from their cages, surrounded Jadzia, wholly ignoring her colleagues. If the Trill had made any noise of protest, it would have been drowned out by the bats' high screeched attempts at sonar guidance echoing in the small room.

A moment later the animals had all settled, quite comfortably, along Dax's head, shoulders, and arms. She turned to Henry and Chance with a bemused smile. "Well. This is certainly an interactive exhibit!"

The sudden swarm of bats doesn't make Chance panic, quite. It freaks her out righteously, however, and she ducks instinctively, covering her head with her arms. Needlessly, as it turns out, since the bats all target Dax. Shit, what if they're rabid? How the fuck did they get out of their plexiglass-encased enclosure in the first place? And --

screeeeeek

the metallic rasp of something being dragged along the concrete floor, just audible above the chittering of Dax's improbable new friends --

screeeeeek

Chance makes herself brave, steps toward the source of the sound. A lone bat is laboriously struggling along as best it can on the ground. It can't fly because it's weighed down by something tied to its body.

Pretty sure the bats can't be rabid given the way they're reacting to Dax, and concerned that this bat might be wounded, Chance kneels to get a better look in the near-darkness.

"Jesus. Someone tied a butter knife to this bat."

Henry blinked, ducking several bats as they swooped toward Dax. He didn't for a moment think it was random--while he knew relatively little about bats, he did know there was almost nothing that would mob a human like that. Someone had let them out--the same someone who had directed them here in the first place, no doubt.

Nebulon. Clearly, his nefarious nature knew no bounds.

A moment was all it took for him to see they weren't actually attacking Dax, so he didn't waste time trying to beat them away. "Are you all right?" he asked, eying the bats askance as he righted his glasses. They seemed perfectly peaceable, now that they were actually perched on her, but that didn't mean they wouldn't decide to freak out.

He knelt beside Chance, his eyebrows raising at the sight of the knife. "Creative, if ineffective," he said, dry, as he reached out and snapped the string that tied the knife to the bat. This worried him--while Nebulon (if it was indeed Nebulon) seemed to be inept, that didn't mean an attack couldn't work by pure accident. "This is...unfortunate," he murmured to Chance.

For the moment, Dax was more concerned with the state of the butter-knife-carrying bat, than any sort of machinations on Nebulon's part. Clearly, he had set-up the entire nocturnal exhibit debacble. But all he had succeeded in doing was making Dax' vacation all the more enjoyable!

"I'm just fine," she said, as all the bats perched upon her person chirped in agreement. "How's the bat? Any external trauma?"

"He might have strained some muscles trying to drag around a kitchen utensil," says Chance dryly. "But I think he's fine," watching the bat flutter up and away -- where he proceeds to jostle his comrades for room on Dax's shoulder.

"Okay, clearly these bats have been prompted to target Dax. They're pretty damn friendly. Who would want to deploy a bat welcome wagon?" Chance squints through the dimness. The bats are not exactly agitated. Bats don't eat people anyway, right? They eat bugs? No -- the placard on the wall says vampire bats.

"They're not biting you, are they?" she ventures to Dax.

"I don't think that was the goal," Henry said, holding up the knife. "I think it was a singularly inept attempt at attack. Nebulon is on our trail."

He looked at Dax and the bats, wondering how to get them off her. They were calm enough right now, but he didn't know what they might do if they didn't feel like being dislodged. Not being Batman, he didn't have any patented bat-repellent.

"Oh, not at all," she reassured Chance. "Vampire bats are highly docile creatures. They usually only attack sleeping mammals. Someone would have to be rather slow to think they could do any sort of lasting damage."

Which would go hand in hand with Henry's assessment of the identity of the perpetrator. Dax tilted her head to the side in consideration, and the bats on her shoulder mimicked the motion. Hm. There was probably a paper in- No time!

"That makes sense. And for whatever reason -no offense to the two of you- he seems to see me as something of an alpha threat. Probably due to the Candyland incident."

Meanwhile, in another part of the vast Hershey complex ...

Through subterranean tunnels, Nebulon journeyed. Some of it was built into the factory and its ancillary outbuildings. Some of it was part of the sewage system. Nebulon blibbled inches above the floors and channels, untouched by it all. He took his time, confident that Wesley Willis had given him the key to defeating his nemesis. Vampire bats could stab anyone in the ass.

That Nebulon could put so much faith in song lyrics by a random lunatic he'd never met might have seemed strange. It was easily explained: Nebulon only knew the human world through the emanations of radio and television beamed out of Earth's atmosphere. He had seized on David Bowie's lyrics as a universal means of communication after intercepting the song "Starman." Why shouldn't Wesley Willis be equally trustworthy and effective?!

Also, Nebulon knew nothing of Earth zoology.

His arrival at Chocolate World went as unheralded as it was unhurried. He snarfled a handful of truffles behind the Scharffen-Berger stand. The employees of Chocolate World knew very well that the strange man in the brown trench coat and Groucho Marx glasses-and-mustache set was not to be apprehended or stopped in any way. Memos had gone out. Most everyone assumed he was just some kind of really eccentric celebrity.

He could do as he pleased while he waited for Dax and her compatriots to show, if they ever did. He didn't think they would.

***

Back at Zoo America...

"Dax is right," Chance affirms for Henry's benefit. He doesn't seem at all afraid of the bats -- indeed, Chance isn't sure whether anything could rattle this guy -- and she wouldn't be surprised if he suddenly started spouting bat trivia he'd memorised from the Encyclopedia Britannica or something, but he's a classicist and she can't assume he knows anything about bats. "Vampire bats wait to attack until the victim's sleeping. Think of them more like mosquitoes, except they don't suck the victim's blood. They bite and then a substance in their saliva keeps the blood from coagulating so they can lick it up. If I remember right." Chance herself hasn't exactly made a specialty out of modern mammals. Amphibians and reptiles millions of years dead are more her speed. Half of what she's saying is dimly remembered from undergrad zoology and from random nature shows on TV. "That's not to say vampire bats in this world couldn't do things I don't expect. I do know there are vampires at Hogwarts. I met one -- name of Thomas. Nice guy." Thomas Raith is -- was, actually; he's popcorn only Chance doesn't know it -- a sex vampire, not a literal bloodsucker, and Chance doesn't feel particularly shy about discussing this since she's never been intimately involved in his feeding habits. Dax might be interested in hearing about it.

Later, that is. Now isn't the time -- Chance catches sight of something white fluttering in the sluggishly circulating air of the closed hall. It's stuck to the wall with chewing gum.

"I think it's a message from your friend," she says to Dax, and reads it for her since Chance doesn't feel like approaching the fluttering mass of bats, benign or not:

" 'My mother said to get things done.
You better not mess with Major Tom.'

"What the fuck? That's a David Bowie song." Chance is unfamiliar with what passes for communication from Nebulon.

"Let's get out of here," she decides. This is all entirely too weird, and more importantly: "There aren't any liopleurodons here. We need to get to Chocolate World."

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traveling with style (closed RP: Nebulon and the liopleurodon researchers)

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